Day 5:
Today we woke up ready for a big day, we were going to visit three amazing places. First up was the Royal Flying Doctor Service, then the mineral museum and the Living Desert. At the RFDS we watched an interesting video about their history and service. I was amazed that last year the RFDS travelled the same distance to the moon and back 7 times! After the video we went on a tour around the RFDS building which was at Broken Hill Airport. We were able to watch the office where the calls are received and planes dispatched. There was a board in the office showing where all the RFDS planes were in NSW. The black planes were attending an emergency and the blue planes were at clinics. After the office we went into my favourite part of the tour - the RFDS hanger. The hanger is where they kept the planes for maintenance.
Next was White’s Mineral Museum. The owner used to be a miner, now he is an artist using the minerals not to become rich, but to make artworks with them. I liked listening to his knowledge about minerals, especially a mineral called Galena. Galena is a mineral that no matter how small you break it down, it will always be a cube. Silver and lead can be extracted from Galena using really strong mixing machine. In Broken Hill zinc is also mined. He turned all of the lights out and got out a candle and put it in a metal holder called a ‘spider.’ All of a sudden everything was black except for the sparkling minerals in the artworks. He explained that’s why he only used pure minerals in his artwork. Our final event of the day was the Living Desert. We visited the top of a mountain where there were sculptures that people from all over the world have made. There were people from Syria, Turkey, America and a few Australians. We could see a lot from the top of the mountain even to Broken Hill, the airport and some nearby mountains. It was really windy. Cam and I leant back into the wind and it almost pushed us the opposite way onto our faces. Once we finished our sculpture walk we went down lower into the National Park. Dad decided that we should do a 2 kilometre walk called the Cultural Walk. We saw aboriginal story poles, aboriginal huts, hillsides that were covered in Quartz, little mines and lots of kangaroo and wildlife lookouts. After the Living Desert experience we went back home to have some dinner.